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You're waiting for me to speak to old facts.

I have 2 teenagers myself.
I try to disregard them as much as possible.
Text me when you’re 30.

When I was 9 years old, I was a creative kid.
Burning Hot Wheels in the backyard with my friend.
I was lucky to have a mother who believed in The Plan.

The moral and ethical implications of Larry's character

1.

They don't need the pills; they don't need the stuff.
You get 4 hour erections? I don't.
A ridiculous thing.
So awful to everybody.
I must've taken a nap during your part.

Something more important than the money--
really hurting somebody--
shows they really loved each other.
How could he not know she got implants?


2.

I grew up in the Bible Belt.
I don't even know a good cuss word.
Well, now that I'm married I know a few.
I once performed in a Synagogue,
and I died a death.


3.

We're in the anti-chamber.
My mother is in the next room,
laid out,
very gorgeous
like they always are after they die.
You have a career, you have a boyfriend,
and now you have a dead mother.
Hates his mother.
That would be considered the don't
except I laughed.
Don't try to out-do the family's grief.


4.

We don't just believe in God,
we believe in everything.
Vampires. Leprechauns. Big Foot.
The Exorcist is a documentary.
That happened to your auntie.


5.

We look like the last two minutes of It's a Small World.

I could tell you something to make this ok, to take away the oh-fuck-what-have-I-done. There are little worlds, like bubbles in honey, sweet and nostalgic amber. You can never reach those. They'll crystallize and lose their urgency, like photos of people I just had to take, just had to document their souls somehow tangibly. They crystallize; now I can't remember their names.

Chasing after a firetruck during the first torrential downpour of the season I thought,

this isn't my life wake up wake up wake up.

I can never reach that.

I know a guy who likes firetrucks; he's far away, like things I've never finished. Little worlds like honey. He told me you can cut anything apart. There's nothing in me to cut, but

when I sleep I feel I could wake up in a thousand pieces.

He's somewhere in the woods, and I'm in the city not wanting to be in the city anymore. Someday our paths will diverge, and I'll be left with all his old beer caps. We'll be stuck in thick amber no longer breathing.

I said my bones are splintering driftwood,

you said, no stop that's not true.

where were you where were you where was i

We can't live like this, but we can't seem to die either.

Car talk

1.

People have been drowning in those rivers lately. I don't know why you would swim somewhere you could drown, and I've never known anyone who drowned, at least not in a river.

2.

Haven't I paid my dues? Bleeding all over the place,
what do people say?
like a stuck pig.
That's gruesome. That's why I don't eat meat.
That and hazard pay.

3.

I spent all morning reading the myspace profile of a dead guy,
"last thoughts." Not knowing he was friends with his murderer and he fucked her. Maybe crimes of passion. His status still says, "is stitious."

4.

I could've saved more. If I don't write things down I'll forget. I forget I've been to Virginia and that I slept there for days. I forget what it looked like to lose my virginity, but I remember leaving my shirt behind when I hurried out at 3am.

5.

I wish I lived underwater. I'm a what-can-I-do-really kind of girl.

6.

weird that parents sleep naked

7.

[Inaudible]
citing irreconcilable differences,
but I always thought of it as a domestic plague.

We fall in ---- at the most inappropriate times.

You jump on planes, over oceans.

This feels something like having my veins tugged.

Stretched out, snapping back.

Tangling varicose.

Rivers splitting your country.

My body is nonsense.

We don't ask questions.

Dear Desert,

You've coarsely eroded

my fingers and lips,

my heavy skin,

pitting my bones--

I drowned

somewhere near Iskandariyya--

for the sake of making a point:

I am not your dusty child,

and this tawny trophy

you pulled from your dirt

and gave to me,

well, you're taking it back.

Egypt

We've gotten by with less.

That is to say,

we've drifted continentally.

Somehow we're united by air.

I said, isn't it funny how 'united' and 'untied' are just a mistake apart,

and you said, let's not make this emotional.

The ocean is a nauseating swell. Something between us.

The biggest part of you, like the Semitic cursive I compared to

tangling seaweed.

A language stuck between my toes.

You'll speak it to me if I beg,

and I beg,

so you curse me

with curled tongue,

saying I only want what I can't have,

and I find it incredibly romantic.

He kept me sour on his skin, like a dog

in heat, like a ravaged girl.

I got him with knives,

needles; he got me with sulfur and fire.

Just to be safe, we separated into a thousand pieces and never called home.

1. I've burned many tongues.

2. I wander the house in the dark.

3. I laugh and laugh and laugh.

I'm losing my touch.

Flood waters churned chocolate milk; the trees drank up, over drank, drowned; the telephone poles toppled, but didn't drown, and the wires snapped from the poles, wind-whipped and furious. Electricity surging through the streets made us feel kinetic until morning when the firemen put everything back in proper order. Sporadically in his bed are wet spots that could be from one of four places. He changed the clocks, placed buckets to catch drips, dropped quarters into jars.

The dream you had about running your tongue across your teeth and one-by-one they fell out--it wasn't real, but when you were patrolling quiet streets and found teeth mixed with gravel like common rocks you had the fleeting thought that they might be yours, and you began counting your teeth with your tongue.

In New Mexico I found a tooth in a ditch near where a man cut another man's head off with a meat cleaver.

[Cut is probably the wrong word. Reports say the cleaver was dull, and his accomplices say he struggled to get the damn thing off, and that they were scared shitless, and that the guy wasn't beheaded all the way, but beheaded enough, so "hacked" is probably a better word.]

I kicked the tooth toward a spot where it looked like he might've died, if it was his tooth at all. A friend told me that in Albuquerque you can get meth, blood, and semen by the bucket-full.

The great ironies of war are like digging through vapor. I can't explain how, but there's this: baby's breath is slow to die, and when it dies it still looks alive.

The citadel will crumble into tiny yellow flowers. The hero-worshipers will dissipate like blue smoke, and the half-helmets, bits and stone will erode vaguely in sandstorms and become old teeth. This is much like saying, "I'm fine". This is how ruins are made. This is, it's hard to say where home is, and when he runs his legs feel like giving out but he doesn't necessarily feel a thing.

His sleep is an empty cigarette carton--stale and flimsy. He shifts tectonically, grinds his teeth and dreams of desert gravel. There was something about body bombs, blood jams spit, spit on blood?

but they're crumbs of a language I never spoke.